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On Being a Public School Insurgent
For a conservative (particularly a social conservative), working as a teacher in America’s public school system feels an awful lot like being an exile in a strange and hostile land.
Earlier in my career, collaboration between teachers, while encouraged, was not mandatory. A teacher’s classroom was one’s own domain. As long as one could substantiate to their principal and students’ parents that their lessons met the curricular objective established by the district, teachers were under no compulsion to teach the same lessons as their colleagues. Those days are long gone. Starting with No Child Left Behind, and accelerating under Common Core, delivery of classroom instruction and assessment is under the direct control of district and school site administration. The “perfect” lesson is one that is “teacher-proof,” sanitized of any distracting individuality, conveying the authorized and approved content with a predictable, mechanical reliability. Such lessons almost universally reflect the progressive dogma prevalent in society currently.
Of course, it is more apparent in some parts of the country than in others. In a deep blue state like mine, publicly identifying as a conservative will bring explicit verbal abuse from progressive co-workers and make one a social pariah. “Well, I didn’t want to be invited to the stupid staff party, anyway,” one grumbles to one’s self, but it extends to more than just after-hours friendships. Once “outed” as a conservative (or even worse, as a “Rethuglican!”) every discussion concerning lesson collaboration becomes a potential minefield – one misstep and boom! Every shared lesson or activity becomes a new source of tension and stress. Nobody wants to to work in an environment where they are treated like a pariah.
I love teaching. I love being a teacher, and the most rewarding aspects of my military service were those that blended leading soldiers with teaching them (particularly when I was teaching them why what we were fighting for was worth fighting for). I suppose that because of these common experiences, I cannot help but see my current situation in terms that reflect my military background. Thus, the “insurgency” simile.
The tactics of an insurgent are relatively simple.
- Phase I: When the government forces are strong and advancing, retreat. Avoid pitched battle and direct confrontation. Harass and interdict; never get decisively engaged. Protect your own forces.
- Phase II: When government forces stop advancing, stop retreating. Observe, ambush, and raid the government’s supply lines. Never let them feel secure moving around the countryside. Build your own strengths.
- Phase III: As government forces weary of tedious and hazardous occupation duty, and as public support back home weakens, they will eventually begin to withdraw. As they withdraw, attack, but always leave them a clear path of retreat.
For the time being, I am in Phase I, because the power of the state is strong, and its forces are many. I craft my lessons subverting progressive dogma whenever I can, and deliberately soften the state’s message when I have little or no opportunity to undermine it outright. I look for ways to let my students know truth exists, separate from their own limited perception of it, and that truth is worth pursuing.
Be that as it may, most of the time I feel like nothing so much as some lone partisan, like a flea-bitten wolf skulking into town, scrawny and malnourished, determinedly chalking rude and defiant graffiti on the walls of the academic citadel: “Romanes eunt domus!”
Usually the only effect I accomplish is to have those I seek to overthrow step-up and correct my grammar: It is “Romani ite domum!”
And so, having delivered a stinging rhetorical dart into the heart of my enemy, I slink back into the hills, nursing my meager resources, and praying for an opportunity to ambush any of my oppressors who might blunder into my miserable patch of forest.
Published in Education
Onward and upward!
How sad, Post! To liken the school environment to a battlefield must be very discouraging! Don’t give up, though. Those kids need you. I especially liked this:
Carry on!
And thank God there are a few teachers like you.
Teachers like you are more needed than ever. Can you give some specific examples where progressive thought is inserted into a lesson? What grade do you teach? I’m amazed because I’ve heard this from others in the teaching profession, even here in FL. I’ve heard Bill Gates had a big hand in Common Core and it was developed to direct kids’ skills into certain “job” directions?
As far as skulking like a flea bitten wolf, you should do the opposite – be the most outlandish, fun, colorful and interesting teacher in the school – you’ll earn big points and be remembered with the kids – forget the co-workers.
I can!
Let’s hear it?
I like your simile! Having taught at the Community College level, there was a bit more freedom, but even there in grades 13 and 14, administrative control creep was seeping into the classrooms. (It’s amazing how the attitude of bureaucrats and administrators = I know better than you classroom teacher…) Anywho… my family has been blessed to have teachers like you in AP-US History…where the tested material is very steeped in progressivism and the students must learn to answer and respond appropriately to pass the AP test…but their teacher was wonderful about challenging them to think about the off-target progressive dribble. (one observation to share – there were more column inches of textbook space given the the treatment/status of women and minorities in the chapter on WW2 then to all the actions/strategy/impact of the War in the Pacific.) Thank you for your service – both military and now on the education frontlines.
-DP
My daughter’s junior year high school History teacher assigned them to make an American “propaganda” poster for WWII. I reported him to the school, telling them that “propaganda” is what we call the posters of the enemy. Also, he had a Malcolm X poster on the wall, and one of those fist-in-the-air posters too.
In first grade, they had track and field day, but nobody was declared the winner of a single race, and everyone got a ribbon.
And every year they had self-esteem crap. On parents’ night in third grade, the teacher posted the children’s self-esteem essays on the wall. I can still remember one of them, written by a little girl:
Also in third grade, pretty much all she learned about Thomas Jefferson was that he got a slave pregnant (oh thank you for saying that to my 8-year-old). That same year, she came home from school and announced that the most important person in American history was Jesse Owens.
And every year, she was taught that the Earth was a pure and pristine place until evil filthy Man came along. Oh, I’ve got a million of ’em.
Certainly, thanks for asking! I currently teach middle school science, including 7th grade Earth Science. “Global Climate Change” is taught as a fact (same as the Theory of Gravity, as though there is no evidence to the contrary). Large amounts of the material in use refer to out-of-date and discredited “data” but challenging its inclusion in the curriculum draws the typical excuse of “well, the consensus of 97% of scientists is that this is true…” One specific lesson makes use of local snow pack data that is three years out-of-date, ignoring the corrective trend in recent data showing snow pack easily within historical normal ranges. When I point this out, my fellow teachers dismiss such objections as “missing the big picture,” meaning the lesson is more about convincing the students of a particular socio-political point of view, and less about teaching them valid science.
Okay maybe this is a bit over-the-top…Actually, I do try sincerely to be the teacher that my students think of as fun, colorful and interesting. They LOVE to hear stories about the military!
Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with this yet – my experience is physics, and that can be as non-political as one pleases (and most districts don’t have too much to say about it – they would have to know something about it first). But it can also be as political as one pleases, too. I’m interviewing for a school tomorrow that uses this as its curriculum, and you can see the sort of base assumptions that are going into them. (And I’m not sure how physics applies to city planning, at least not how they’re using it.)
Wow!! That link that you included is an eye-opener (understatement).
Postmodern, you are a Jedi Knight doing the Lords work in the bowls of the Death Star. May the Force be with you.
My mentor just retired as an asst. super for curriculum in one of the local districts and said 80% of his job was telling OSPI to pack sand.
You said it! One of the reasons our property taxes keep going up is that we now support multiple “director of curriculum” positions at each level of school.
Preach, brother.
I teach at the collegiate level -I’ve posted a few times on it. Same problems. The state actually doesn’t help even remotely. The standards they want me to teach for an Intro to American Government class are all court decisions and facts from history. These aren’t unimportant (though I note that students should already know how many justices sit on the US Supreme Court from high school…) but hardly the kind of thing a college graduate should be learning.
Almost every textbook treats civil rights and civil liberties as a story of the Court, ignoring the century and a half of legislative protection of civil rights -not to mention the greatest civil rights protection being how darn hard it was to get laws passed at the federal level, while leaving people at the state level free to move across the frontier to escape tyrannical states.
I, too, engage in a little subversion. First, by flatly teaching the stuff the books leave out. And second by trying to provide the history and context for the development of American government. I hope, though I don’t know how many students get it -that laying out the series of conflicts in Europe and England that resulted in the US states, and how that led to the Federal system might give my students a bit of an understanding of why a strong central government is so dangerous. The founders saw strong central governments in the Holy Roman Empire and in England lead to civil wars one after another. And they saw the dangers of the French Revolution (even if Jefferson was blind to them).
Keep up the good fight!
We have our daughter in a charter arts and science school. There are no safe spaces and the kids who act up or do not make the grade get shown the door. We couldn’t be happier about it.
Could you comment on your relationship with pedagogical literature/experts? Granted, my experience with teaching is at the university level, but I always felt like that push for standardized lessons and methodology was driven by whatever M. Ed. was lurking in our department at the moment. The literature does seem to be politicized, and worse is wholly impracticable— e.g. in an hour long discussion section the Education Science Approved lesson plan would involve short lecture, group work, solo work, solo presentations, group presentations and reading, all while keeping a keen and focused awareness of the racial, cultural, and economic diversity of the students in the room. Whatever happened to simply leveraging my expertise to teach Physics to willing students?
Do you similarly have some stripe of administrator pushing pedagogy down your throat? Does it wear the name “Common Core”?
Are you a member of the AAPT by any chance? When I won our department’s teaching award, I was given a membership and am now on their physical and electronic mailing lists. There are constant references to social justice, etc.
Nope. I figured that I would avoid all such things, at least until I actually got a job teaching.
As a special education teacher working specifically with children classified as Behaviorally/Emotionally Handicapped I had immunity for most of my career from the idiocies you describe. I had to attend workshops. My last principal began weeding out older teachers a few years before I retired. I saw several very skilled and talented teachers with long, successful careers forced out by the use of unsatisfactory or less than satisfactory annual evaluations. In both cases the teacher would be put on a probation during which absurd requirements would be applied, lesson plans handed into an administrator every week, the loss of classes with the better behaved, more motivated kids, being given assignment to teach in areas they were not specifically trained in. One friend whose classes I loved to sit in and listen to was a history teacher who was forced in her final year to teach a home economics class. I saw several others subjected to similar indignities. This was done, not because the teachers weren’t great teachers, but, rather, because they did not want to teach a “new” curriculum that was a combination of just about every fad that had been tried over the last forty years of so and found to be valueless.
Our principal was one of the new generation of education school graduates. He spent five years in the classroom before getting administrative credentials and never returning to the classroom as a teacher. We had very few “administrators” who had even as much as ten years of classroom experience. What they did have was a total indoctrination from the University of Washington School of Education in which they learned all of the needed buzzwords to interview well for their positions. They also formed close relationships with others who they would assist and receive assistance from as they rose through the hierarchy of the system.
When my principal came after me he was unable to attack my skills or the manner in which I ran my classroom. I had been far too successful over too many years including several in which he gave me glowing evaluations. However, my politics and unwillingness to remain quiet during workshops or faculty meetings made me a thorn in his side. I had been excused from attending faculty meeting for a long time largely because it was easier that way. He knew I detested them and the dissemination of nonsense they represented. His attack on me was to require me to attend faculty meetings every week. The first one I went to following his dictum was followed by my looking at retirement as an option. The “sharing” and the buzzwords created an atmosphere that clogged my BS filters within minutes of the start of the meeting. I felt like I was drowning in manure.
I got my revenge. They did not find a replacement for me for 3 years. Substitutes lasted no more than a day. The administrators took two classes each each day until a new teacher was found.
Postmodern Hoplite,
What a vivid, thought provoking post this is.
I know I shouldn’t be so lazy that I’m asking you this instead of looking it up, but what does Romanes eunt domus mean ? Why should it be Romani ite domum ?
It’s heartening to know you’re out there. And to find out, from reading the comments on this post, that there are others; even some still working in similar enemy controlled territory. I’ll be asking myself where and how the tactics of an insurgent can be applied to my own life.
I get to reply? sweet!
Lol, this reminds me of when I taught 5th grade, I was given extremely explicit AIDS material by the DOE to teach to a bunch of middle class Chinese, Albanians, and Italians. I dumped them in the trash. Intimate moral education is the parents job, no number of guidance counselors and sjw teachers will make an impact, well maybe a negative impact but not a positive one.
My advice to teacher that are Conservative. Teach WWII. No matter what your discipline.
Makes Europe look bad, wester civilization good, and nobody can tell you not to.
I don’t think there’s much you can do about these particular materials.
But you might consider surrounding them with other materials that call into question the attitude towards these facts.
For example, you could show graphs that purport to show inevitable crises in
You could give show them examples of experts who were wrong
In each case, present the Pro and Con arguments from the limited perspective of the time in which the debate took place. Ask the students why people would have naturally wanted to side with the experts, and why the experts were reluctant to give up their positions.
And just leave it at that. You don’t need to form their opinions. You just need to open the door to other possibilities.
I graduated college a few years ago at the ripe old age of 54. I was involved in a discussion with a bunch of more traditional-aged students who thought me an ignorant fossil because I wasn’t on board with all the global warming nonsense. “But, the experts…!” they told me. Most of the other students were black, so I pointed out that in the 1850s the “experts” were arguing that black people were incapable of managing their own lives and were better off within the structured life of slavery. That got a little bit of chin-stroking and some puzzled looks going. Once they were on the ropes, I pointed out that the slave-owners were profiting mightily from slavery, so maybe their opinion might have been a little bit skewed by their own self interests.
Great point. Glad to see it had an effect, too.
I’ve often thought that the 19th-century slavery debate offers a useful analog for the abortion debates. What’s at odds in the abortion debate is a fundamental disagreement on the relative importance the right to life and the right to liberty. At odds in the slavery debate was the relative importance of the right to liberty and the right to property. Plantation owners had paid for their slaves; can Northerners with comfortable livelihoods just take away that property and with it a family’s livelihood?
Of course we now recognize that having liberty is incompatible with being property. In this particular case, liberty is more fundamental–and few people today would even think about questioning that statement.
In the case of abortion, it’s pretty clear (to me at least) that the life of the fetus is more important than the liberty of the mother. And if people want to argue otherwise, I’ll just say that at one point people used Lockeian rights to make arguments for slavery.
Well done, @mramy ! I was starting to despair that anyone would get the joke, so you’ve made my evening!
I believe that on the Secondary level, the teaching situation is largely a reflection of the values of your community. Blue district? See above. Red district? Different set of problems.
Mmmm – perhaps a bit, but not completely. My experience was: I taught high school math at a rural Texas high school for 16 years, starting at age 39 after serving in the military for 9 years (both enlisted and commissioned) and 8 years as a corporate suit.
My school is in a county which essentially has no functioning Democratic Party (I don’t know why IOS auto corrected that to be capitalized). We had a handful of teachers with leftist views. Although none of them lasted long, they constantly interjected politics into classroom discussions.
The curriculum problem comes from a different source than pure politics. Public education is full of administrators with titles like curriculum director who have poor or limited classroom skills. They seize on curricula offered by for-profit companies and non-profits because they are touted as ways to improve test scores, behavior, blah, blah, blah. And basically everything coming forth from the academy is already infused with the prevailing leftist views.
I am now serving on my local school board and hope to make a difference.
Many of the problems endemic to public education are simply not a function of left/right politics. A self-identified conservative parent is just as likely to be a helicopter parent demanding extra chances for their kid as would be a self-identified dope smoking hippie parent (and even here in the Texas Hill country we have more of those than you might expect).
Come to think of it, I should start my own discussion.